Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old work.

I am quite sure there has been no book like this. The Sign of Jonas is a diary kept during five years spent in a Trappist monastery by a young monk who, as everyone doubtless knows, can write unusually well. Of course many others have described their experiences as members of religious orders, but generally they have either...